Data center electricity use, measured in people

The average American uses about 12 kWh of electricity a day at home, or 4,437 kWh a year: EIA's 2020 figure for residential electricity per person (retail electricity sold to homes ÷ U.S. population). Each site's capacity is multiplied by the 8,760 hours in a year and an 80% utilization rate, then divided by one person's yearly home use. The result is how many people's home electricity the building matches, and the map shows a U.S. city or state with about that many residents. It is not the building's share of the grid.

Operating sites are the largest single buildings running today (0.26–1.1 GW), as listed in the Cleanview database; entries that group a numbered range of buildings are left out. Each is matched to a U.S. city. Planned projects are shown at their full announced build-out (5–11 GW), using the developer’s or the government’s own figure. That comes to 8–17 million people, more than any U.S. city, so each is matched to a state, or to a pair of neighboring states where that fits better. Each place is used once, so every data center gets a different example.

Per-capita residential use is an average: an all-electric house in Phoenix uses several times what a Manhattan apartment does. Planned projects take years to build and may never be finished at that scale. Floor areas are rough estimates (2,500 ft²/MW), used only to size the square on the map; at state scale it shrinks to about one pixel.

Operating capacity

Cleanview, U.S. data-center database, single-building entries, compiled October 2026

Planned capacity

Project Matador 11 GW: Fermi America via DCD; PORTS 10 GW: U.S. Department of Energy via AP; Delta Gigasite 10 GW: Creekstone via Energy Digital; Monarch 8 GW: Nscale; Wonder Valley 7.5 GW: The Logic; New Era Lea 7 GW: New Era via DCD; Hyperion 5 GW: Meta via W.Media; GW Ranch 5 GW: Pacifico Energy, bought by Amazon; Nexus Hubbard 6.4 GW: Cleanview only. Each was checked against the sum of Cleanview’s building entries, October 2026

Household electricity

4,437 kWh per person per year, U.S. EIA, 2020 (latest published per-capita residential)

Household water

82 gallons per person per day, USGS Circular 1441, 2015 domestic deliveries

City and state population

U.S. Census Bureau, American Community Survey 5-year via Census Reporter (2020–2024 for every place)

Place outlines

OpenStreetMap and Census TIGER place polygons (Phoenix, Dallas and five water towns from TIGERweb, October 2026), and PublicaMundi us-states.json, simplified

Satellite imagery

Esri World Imagery (Maxar, Earthstar Geographics)

Data-center announcements are written in megawatts, and almost nobody can picture a megawatt. Everyone can picture a city, so the map draws each data center to scale inside a place whose residents use as much electricity at home. Up close the square fills the screen. Zoom out to the city limits and it is a speck, still using as much electricity as everyone inside the line.

Alexander Sousa. First published September 2026, revised October 2026. Set in Source Serif 4 and Libre Franklin, mapped with Leaflet on Esri World Imagery.